The Living Dead

by John Joseph Adams

  (The Stage Manager has risen to his feet. In his right hand, he holds out a long-barreled pistol trailing a wisp of smoke. For what is probably not more than five seconds, he keeps the gun trained on the pastor’s unmoving body, then raises the revolver and returns it to a shoulder holster under his left arm. Owen Trezza continues staring at the corpse as the spotlight snaps off. The Stage Manager resumes his seat.)

  Stage Manager: No, there are some marksmen and -women about, that’s for sure, but it’s equally sure they’re in the minority. Most folks have to rely on other methods. A few would-be he-men have tried to play Conan the Barbarian, rushed the zombies with a hatchet in one hand, a butcher knife in the other. One particularly inspired specimen, a heavyset guy named Gary Floss, rip-started the chainsaw he’d bought to take down the line of pines in front of his house. (This was a mistake: then everyone saw what lousy shape Gary kept his house in.) The problem is, that hatchet you have in your right hand isn’t a weapon; it’s a tool you’ve used splitting wood for the fireplace, and while it’s probably sharp enough for another winter’s worth of logs, it’s not going to separate someone’s head from their shoulders with a single blow from your mighty arm. The same thing’s true for the knife sweating up your left hand: it’s cutlery, and if you recall the effort it takes to slice a roast with it—a roast that is not trying to find its way inside your skull with its persistent fingers—you might want to reconsider your chances of removing limbs with ease. Even if you have a razor-sharp ax and an honest-to-God machete, these things are actually rather difficult to use well. The movies—again—aside, no one picks up this kind of weapon and is instantly skilled with it; you need training. In the meantime, you’re likely to leave your hatchet lodged in a collar bone, the pride of your assorted knives protruding above a hip.

  As for Gary Floss and his chainsaw—you want to be careful swinging one of those around. A man could take off an arm.

  (To the right and left of the theater, the snarl of a chainsaw starting. It revs once, twice, a third time, changes pitch as it catches on something. It blends with a man’s voice shrieking—then silence.)

  Stage Manager: What works is fire. Zombies move away from fire faster than they move towards a fresh kill. The problem is, they’re not especially flammable—no more than you or I are—so you have to find a way to make the fire stick. For a time, this meant Billy Joe Royale’s homemade napalm. A lingering sense of civic responsibility precludes me from disclosing the formula for Billy Joe’s incendiary weapon, which he modified from suggestions in—was it The Anarchist Cookbook? or an old issue of Soldier of Fortune? or something he’d watched on the Discovery Channel, back before it stopped broadcasting? (It’s the damnedest thing: do you know, the History Channel’s still on the air? Just about every other channel’s gone blue. Once in a while, one of the stations out of the City will manage a broadcast; the last was a week and a half ago, when the ABC affiliate showed a truncated news report that didn’t tell anyone much they hadn’t already heard or guessed, and a rerun of an episode of General Hospital from sometime in the late nineties. But wherever the History Channel is located, someone programmed in twenty-four hours’ worth of old World War II documentaries that have been playing on continuous loop ever since. You go from D-Day to Pearl Harbor to Anzio, all of it in black and white, interrupted by colorful ads for restaurant chains that haven’t served a meal in a month, cars that no one’s seen on the road for as long, movies that never made it to the theater. Truth to tell, I think the folks who bother to waste their generator’s power on the TV do so more for the commercials than any nostalgia for a supposed Greatest Generation. These days, a Big Mac seems an almost fabulous extravagance, a Cadillac opulent decadence, a new movie an impossible indulgence.)

  That’s all a bit off-topic, though. We were talking about Billy Joe and his bathtub napalm. By the time he perfected the mixture, the situation here had slid down the firepole from not-too-bad to disastrous, all within the matter of a couple of days. Where we are—

  Son of a gun. I never told you the name of this place, did I? I apologize. It’s—the zombies have become so much the center of existence that they’re the default topic of conversation, what we have now instead of the weather. This is the town of Goodhope Crossing, specifically, the municipal cemetery out behind the Dutch Reformed Church. Where I’m sitting is the oldest part of the place; the newer graves are…

  (The Stage Manager points out at the audience.)

  Stage Manager: Relax, relax. While there’s nowhere that’s completely safe anymore, the cemetery’s no worse a danger than anyplace else. For the better part of—I reckon it must be going on four decades, local regulations have decreed that every body must be buried in a properly sealed coffin, and that coffin must be buried within a vault. To prevent contamination of groundwater and the like. The zombies have demonstrated their ability to claw their way out of all sorts of coffins time and again, but I have yet to hear of any of them escaping a vault. Rumors to the contrary, they’re not any stronger than you or me; in fact, as a rule, they tend to be weaker. And the longer they go without feeding, the weaker they become. Muscle decay, you know. Hunger doesn’t exactly kill them—it more slows them down to the point they’re basically motionless. Dormant, you might say. So the chances are good that anyone who might’ve been squirming around down there in the dirt has long since run out of gas. Granted, not that I’m in any rush to make absolutely sure.

  It is true, those who passed on before the requirement for a vault were able to make their way to the surface. A lot of them weren’t exactly in the best of shape to begin with, though, and the ordeal of breaking out of their coffins and fighting up through six feet of earth—the soil in these parts is dense, thick with clay and studded with rocks—it didn’t do anything to help their condition, that’s for sure. Some of the very old ones didn’t arrive in one piece, and there were some who either couldn’t complete the trip or weren’t coherent enough even to start it.

  (Stage right, a stage light pops on, throwing a dim yellow glow over one of the tombstones and JENNIFER and JACKSON HOWLAND, her standing behind the headstone, him seated on the ground in front of and to its right. They are sister and brother, what their parents’ friends secretly call Catholic or Irish twins: Jennifer is ten months her brother’s senior, which currently translates to seventeen to his sixteen. They are siblings as much in their build—tall yet heavy—as they are in their angular faces, their brown eyes, their curly brown hair. Both are dressed in orange hunting caps and orange hunting vests over white cable-knit sweaters, jeans, and construction boots. Jennifer props a shotgun against her right hip and snaps a piece of bubblegum. Jackson has placed his shotgun on the ground behind him; chin on his fists, he stares at the ground.)

  Jennifer: I still say you’re sitting too close.

  Jackson: It’s fine, Jenn.

  Jennifer: Yeah, well, see how fine it is when I have to shoot you in the head to keep you from making me your Happy Meal.

  (Jackson sighs extravagantly, pushes himself backwards, over and behind his gun.)

  Jackson: There. Is that better?

  Jennifer: As long as the person whose grave you’re sitting on now doesn’t decide your ass would make a tasty treat.

  (Jackson glares at her and climbs to his feet.)

  Jennifer: Aren’t you forgetting something?

  (She nods at the shotgun lying on the ground. Jackson thrusts his hands in the pockets of his vest.)

  Jackson: I’m sure there’ll be plenty of time for me to arm myself if anything shows up.

  Jennifer: Don’t be so sure. Christine Compton said her family was attacked by a pair of eaters who ran like track stars.

  Jackson: Uh-huh.

  Jennifer: Why would she make that up?

  Jackson: She—did Mr. Compton kill them?

  Jennifer: It was Mrs. Compton, actually. Christine’s dad can’t shoot worth shit.

  Jackson: Regardless—they’re both dead, these sprinting zombies.
Again. So we don’t have to worry about them.

  Jennifer: There could be others. You never know.

  Jackson: I’ll take my chances. (Pauses.) Besides, it’s not as if we need to be here in the first place.

  Jennifer: Oh?

  Jackson: Don’t you think, if Great-grandma Rose were going to return, she would have already? I mean, it’s been like, what? ten days? two weeks? since the last ones dug themselves out. And it took them a while to do that.

  Jennifer: Right, which means there could be others who’ll need even longer.

  Jackson: Do you really believe that?

  Jennifer: Look—it’s what Dad wants, okay?

  Jackson: And we all know he’s the poster-child for mental health these days.

  Jennifer: What do you expect? After what happened to Mom and Lisa—

  Jackson: What he says happened.

  Jennifer: Not this shit again.

  Jackson: All I’m saying is, the three of them were in the car—in a Hummer, for Christ’s sake. They had guns. How does that situation turn against you? That’s an honest question. I’d love to know how you go from that to—

  Jennifer: Just shut up.

  Jackson: Whatever.

  (The siblings look away from one another. Jackson wanders the graves to the right, almost off-stage, then slowly turns and walks back to their great-grandmother’s grave. While he does, Jennifer checks her gun, aims it at the ground in front of the tombstone, and returns it to its perch on her hip. Jackson steps over his shotgun and squats beside the grave.)

  Jackson: Did Dad even know her?

  Jennifer: His grandmother? I don’t think so. Didn’t she die before he was born? Like, years before, when Grandpa Jack was a kid?

  Jackson: I guess. I don’t remember. Dad and I never talked about that kind of stuff—family history.

  Jennifer: I’m pretty sure he never met her.

  Jackson: Great.

  (Another pause.)

  Jennifer: You want to know what I keep thinking about?

  Jackson: Do I have a choice?

  Jennifer: Hey, fuck you. If that’s the way you’re going to be, fuck you.

  Jackson: I’m sorry. Sorry, geez.

  Jennifer: Forget it.

  Jackson: Seriously. Come on. I’m sorry.

  Jennifer: I was going to say that, for like the last week, I haven’t been able to get that Thanksgiving we went to Grandpa Jack’s out of my head. That cranberry sauce Dad made—

  Jackson: Oh yeah, yeah! Man, that was awful. What was it he put in it…

  Jennifer: Jalapeño peppers.

  Jackson: Yes! Yes! Remember, Grandpa started coughing so hard—

  Jennifer: His teeth shot out onto Mom’s plate!

  Jackson: Yeah… (He wipes his eyes.) Hey. (He stands, stares down at the grave.) Is that—what is that?

  Jennifer: What?

  Jackson: (Pointing.) There. In the middle. See how the ground’s…

  (Jennifer positions her gun, setting the stock against her shoulder, lowering the barrel, and steps around the headstone.)

  Jennifer: Show me.

  (Jackson kneels, brings his right hand to within an inch of the ground.)

  Jennifer: Not so close.

  Jackson: You see it, right?

  (Jennifer nods. Jackson rises and steps back onto his gun, almost tripping over it.)

  Jennifer: You might want to cover your ears.

  (Jennifer fires five times into the earth. Jackson slaps his hands to either side of his head as dirt jumps up from the grave. The noise of the shotgun is considerable, a roar that chases its echoes around the inside of the theater. There’s a fair amount of gunsmoke, too, so that when Jennifer steps back and raises her gun, Jackson coughs and waves his arms to clear the air.)

  Jackson: Holy shit.

  Jennifer: No sense in doing a half-assed job.

  Jackson: Was it her?

  Jennifer: I think so. Something was right at the surface.

  Jackson: Let’s hope it wasn’t a woodchuck.

  Jennifer: Do you see any woodchuck guts?

  Jackson: I don’t see much of anything. (He stoops, retrieves his shotgun.) Does this mean we can go home?

  Jennifer: We should probably wait a couple more minutes, just to be sure.

  Jackson: Wonderful.

  (The two of them stare down at the grave. The stage light pops off.)

  Stage Manager: Siblings.

  Right—what else can I tell you about the town? I don’t imagine latitude and longitude are much use; I’m guessing it’ll be more helpful for me to say that New York City’s about an hour and a half south of here, Hartford an hour and a half east, and the Hudson River twenty minutes west. In an average year, it’s hot in the summer, cold in the winter. There’s enough snow to give the kids their fair share of snow days; you can have thunderstorms so fierce they spin off tornadoes like tops. At one time, this was IBM country; that, and people who commuted to blue collar jobs in the City at places like Con Ed. That changed twice, the first time in the early nineties, when IBM collapsed and sent a host of middle-aged men and women scrambling for work. The second time was after 9/11, when all the affluent folks who’d suddenly decided Manhattan was no longer their preferred address realized that, for the same amount of money you were spending on your glorified walk-in closet, you could be the owner of a substantial home on a reasonable piece of property in place that was still close enough to the City for you to have a manageable commute.

  Coming after the long slowdown in new home construction that had followed IBM’s constriction, this sent real estate prices up like a Fourth of July rocket. Gentrification, I guess you’d call it. What it meant was that your house significantly appreciated in value in what seemed like no more than a month—it wasn’t overnight, no, not that fast, but fast enough, I reckon. We’re talking thirty, forty, fifty percent climbs, sometimes higher, depending on how close you were to a Metro-North station, or the Taconic Parkway. It also meant a boom in the construction of new homes—luxury models, mostly. They didn’t quite achieve the status of McMansions, but they were too big on the outside with too few rooms on the inside and crowded too close to their neighbors, with a front yard that was just about big enough to be worth the effort it was going to cost you to yank the lawnmower to life every other Saturday. If you owned any significant amount of property, the temptation to cash in on all the contractors making up for lost time was nigh irresistible. That farm that hadn’t ever been what you’d call a profit-machine, and that had been siphoning off more money that it gave back for more years than you were comfortable admitting, became a dozen, fifteen parcels of land, a new little community with a name, something like Orchard Hills, that you could tell yourself was an acknowledgement of its former occupant.

  What this expansion of houses meant was that, when the zombies started showing up in significant numbers, they found family after family waiting for them in what must have seemed like enormous lunchboxes.

  (From the balcony, another spotlight snaps on, its tightly focused beam picking out MARY PHILLIPS standing in front of the orchestra pit. Although she faces the audience, her gaze is unfocused. She cannot be thirty. Her red hair has been cut recently—poorly, practically hacked off in places, where it traces the contours of her skull, and only partially touched in others, where it sprouts in tufts and a couple of long strands that suggest its previous style. The light freckles on her face are disturbed by the remnants of what must have been an enormous black eye, which has faded to a motley of green and yellow, and a couple of darker spots, radiating out from her right eye. She is wearing a white dress shirt whose brownish polka dots appear to have been applied irregularly, even haphazardly, a pair of almost-new dark jeans, and white sneakers clumped with mud. She keeps her hands at her sides in tight fists.)

  Mary: I was in the kitchen, boiling water for pasta. We’d had a gas delivery a couple of weeks before—it’s funny: everything’s falling to pieces—this was after the first outbreak had
been contained, and all the politicians and pundits were saying yes, we’d had a close call, but the worst was past—what had happened in India, Asia, what was happening in South America—none of that was going to happen here. No matter that there were reports the things—what we were calling the eaters, because zombies sounded too ridiculous—the eaters had been sighted in a dozen different places from Maine to California, none of them previously affected. You heard stories—my next-door neighbor, Barbara Odenkirk—she was the HR director for an ad agency in Manhattan, and she commuted to the City every day, took the train from Beacon. The last time we talked, she told me that there were more of them, the eaters, along the sides of the tracks every trip. She said none of the guys on the train acted particularly concerned—if an eater came too close to a moving train, it didn’t end well for them. I asked her about the places alongside the tracks, what about them, the towns and cities and houses—I’d taken that same ride I don’t know how many times, when Ted and I first started seeing one another, and I remembered all the houses you saw sitting off in the woods. Oh, Barbara said, she was sure the local police were on top of the situation. They weren’t, of course, not like Barbara thought. I don’t know why. When that soccer game in Cold Spring was attacked—we were so surprised, so shocked, so outraged. We should have been packing our cars, cramming everything we could fit into our Volvos and BMWs and heading out of town, tires screaming. Where, I’m not sure. Maybe north, up to the Adirondacks—I heard the situation isn’t as bad there. Even the Catskills might have been better.

  But the gas truck pulled into the driveway the way it did every six months, and the power was on more than it was out, and we could drive to Shop Rite—where, if the shelves were stocked thinner than we’d ever seen them, and the butcher case was empty, not to mention the deli and fish counters, we could fill our baskets with enough of the foods we were used to for us to tell ourselves that the President was right, we were through the roughest part of this, and almost believe it. Ted had bought a portable generator when the first outbreak was at its height, and it looked as if Orlando would be overrun; everyone else was buying whatever guns they could lay their hands on, and here’s my husband asking me to help him unload this heavy box from the back of the car. He was uptight—I think he was expecting me to rake him over the coals for not having returned from Wal-Mart with an armful of rifles. I wasn’t angry; if anything, I was impressed with his foresight. I wasn’t especially concerned about being armed—at that point, I still believed the police and National Guard were capable of dealing with the eaters, and if they weren’t, I was surrounded by neighbors who were two steps away from forming their own militia. The blackouts, though—we were lucky: the big one only lasted here until later that same night. According to NPR, there were places where the lights were out for a week, ten days. But there were shorter outages every few days, most no more than five or ten seconds, a few a solid couple of hours. Having the generator—not to mention the big red containers of gas I had no idea how Ted had obtained: rationing was already in effect, and most gas stations were pretty serious about it—that generator gave me a feeling of security no machine gun could have matched. To tell the truth, I was more worried by Ted’s insistence that he could hook it up himself. Being in IT does not give you the magical ability to master any and all electrical devices—how many times had I said that to him? Especially when Sean Reynolds two houses over is an electrician who loves helping out with this kind of stuff. But no, he’s fully capable of doing this, which is what he’d said about the home entertainment system he tripped half the circuit breakers in the house setting up. What was I supposed to do? I made sure to unplug the computers, though, as well as the entertainment center.